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Carson paraphrases, hell’s as deep as the sun is high
You say (or was it me?) and pull another bump
Off a house key’s sawtooth end, waxing: considering
The model of the universe as we understand it
From syndication Discovery, Sagan and his dots
The what of everything infinitely bigger than that
Right?—whole galaxies
Galaxies-farther than the sun is away from us—
What are we supposed to make of a hell whole hells
Deeper?
You do the thing where your eyes parse the room
The kind of party where nobody knows what song is playing
Touching only momentarily
On each refocusing detail: a potted spider-plant’s
Spindly reach, the slit
Of light appearing at the refrigerator door’s opening
Suck, heads on bodies
All bouying a weird dance—those eyes
A pair of scavengers flickering a parking lot
Littered with the chilly bones of Olde
English bottles
Unable to land, not quite.
There’s something hard and weightless keeping us
From each other’s irises
Asking anything, even
Continuing the conversation
Which circles
Upward on the humming thermal column
At the center of all conversation
Through the ceiling and away.
San Francisco:
It’s afternoon. We’re crossing the heaving lung of the Tenderloin
Past grim building-fronts
Named in typefaces from another time—
Circled in bulbs, tubed neon, unlit
Sleeping, or embering a fading
Anonymous red—
What maybe once could’ve been
A different town
But probably not. You say
This last part easy as somebody orders coffee
Twenty-two and already certain there are places
That are graves
Where stopping turns to staying just another couple days
In a gutted squat
Working on a mural that is swirls of stolen paint, a churning
Face remembered, but from when?
Since dropping out of art school you don’t see faces the same way
You tell me
And kick a stone down the weed-split sidewalk, its squares
Just barely
Wobbled out of level by time or tremor, both—
An angular passage
Along which we, too, are moved
By some unnameable force—
The what of the face—
The binary of what is and isn’t in it—
An ex-lover’s red wink, your mother’s paper mouth
The damning syllables passing through it—
And in your own, becoming
More and more the movement of colors
Into one another than what comes after.
You begin to draw small circles in the heavy air
Squinting as each invisible lick
Overlaps the one before it
So what I imagine
Is a form ending itself over and over
On the blade of what replaces it.
IG: @fmstringer
